Memory is Currency

How Forgetting Makes Us Intellectually Poor

Breton, The Song of the Lark, 1884

I remember sitting in my mother’s lap in the rocking chair beside the kitchen stove, and the sound of her voice singing in time to the beat of the rockers. I remember that in winter we lived mostly in the kitchen, for the kitchen as the only room with a stove. I remember my father’s shop, which I loved. I remember the plows and sleds that ook shape there in the light of the open doorway. I remember my father bent over a horse’s hoof held between his nees. I remember the ringing of the anvil and the screech of hot metal in the slack tub. I remember walking from ouse to shop, holding my mother’s hand. I remember a hound named Stump and a horse named Joe and a cow named Bell.
- Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow.

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THE CENTRAL THESIS of the following essay is pretty straightforward. Our modern culture has a distorted view of the role memory plays in thinking and living, and we suffer because of it. As technological developments have helped us offload the burden of memory, we have lost touch with the important ability of remembering. The kind of memory described in the above passage from Wendell Berry seems almost foreign and mystical to us. I think that this is largely the result of how we have grown accustomed to talking about the role of memory in education.

I have the wonderful privilege of teaching an undergraduate class on Education in American Culture. One of my favorite lessons to teach is on the educational reform movement from the early half of the twentieth century. I often start off the class with this video featuring footage and quotes from thinkers like John Dewey and William Kilpatrick. It really is a wonderful artifact to use when teaching this material.

After using it for three semesters, the quote that always gets a reaction from students occurs early in the video. The narrator talks disparagingly about the old stodgy traditional education where:

Johnny learned his multiplication tables as his father and grandfather had before him, through endless classroom drills. By the same process, he learned the key dates of history and impossible-to-spell words. And geography. The drill formula was simple, if monotonous. And Johnny's marks were more apt to measure the strength of his memory than his understanding. (Progressive Education in the 1940s, 01:21)

That line about, “impossible-to spell-words,” always gets a good laugh out of me.

For the most part, the student’s I teach tend to have a very different response to the video than I do. Where they hear and join in the lament of rigid and stodgy memory drills; I hear the echoes of a manner of thinking that has largely been lost in our culture. And while it is easy to point the finger at “memorization” as the enemy of thinking and learning, I believe that this scapegoating is mostly inappropriate.

In this essay, I want to make a particular case and argue that memory is everything. It is the storehouse of observations that we collect and use for our thinking. Without memory, we become dependent on other persons or systems to draw upon for our thinking. Further, that the real enemy of excellent thinking is detached or purposeless thinking. In short, memory is the currency of thought that helps us to form rich and meaningful ideas.

In what follows, I attempt to lay out this position in three points: Memory is essential for (1) excellent thinking, (2) living well, and (3) love.

(1) Memory is Essential for Excellent Thinking

A richly filled and tenacious memory is a precious resource. - Sertillanges

The first image that likely comes to mind when you think about memory and learning is the negative memory of crisp white flashcards, mindless repetition, and recall tests. But this is a truncated view. Memorization, properly understood, is not about the mere repetition of facts for their own sake, it is about stockpiling the raw materials from which thought is constructed.

I like to think of memory as the currency of the intellect. Memory is ownership. The more we memorize, the more intellectually wealthy we become. Every fact we recall, every image we carry, every quote that lingers in the back of our mind can be put to use in the construction of thoughts and ideas.

This is why memory is third in the order of the Cognitive Skill Stack. We first need attention and observation to gather material. Then, memory stores what we’ve gathered so it can later be organized (taxonomy) and used in reasoning. A thinker with a poor memory is like a craftsman missing half his tools. He might complete the job, but the quality and creativity of his work will suffer.

In my own writing and teaching, I often describe memory as the storehouse of observation. Learning is not complete until we take full possession of what we’ve encountered, when knowledge becomes a working part of our thought and communication. Without memory, our thinking remains shallow and present-tense, limited to what’s right in front of us. Every act of synthesis, every analogy, every creative project depends on prior material, and that material lives in the memory.

Further, like currency, memory increases in value when it's shared. A person rich in memory can offer quotations, insights, stories, and mental frameworks that others may not possess. They are the intellectual equivalent of someone with gold in their pockets when everyone else is swiping plastic. Their ideas are weightier, more meaningful, more beautiful.

Technology will tempt us to believe that we don’t need to remember anything. But thinking with search bars is like borrowing cash every time you need to make a purchase. It might work in the immediate, but it is an impoverished way of thinking. It is thinking without ownership, which is (to me at least) the true enemy of modern education.

If we want to grow in the art of excellent thinking, we must restore our reverence for memory. The mind needs material. Thinking, like building, begins with what you have on hand.

TRY IT: Practice Investing in Memory

• Choose a paragraph or short philosophical argument to memorize. (I once committed the central points of St. Augustine’s Epistle 155 to memory)

• Memorize a vocabulary list of key terms in a discipline you’re studying.

• Memorize a moment: the shape of a rosebush in full bloom, the way the light filters through trees on a May morning, the way the wind feels at night after a summer rain under a full moon.

(2) Memory is Essential for Living Well

We do not live by memory, we use our memory to live. Engrave on your mind whatever can help you to conceive or carry out a project, whatever your soul can assimilate, whatever can serve your purpose, vivify your inspiration, and sustain your work. As for the rest, consign it to oblivion. - Sertillanges

I’ll open this section with another controversial take: Whatever educational failure we’ve pinned on memory is really a failure to connect facts to meaning. In other words, there are no useless facts, only disconnected ones.

At a practical level, some of the material we may memorize is simply useful for everyday living. Such as the time I explained to a hardware store clerk that visualizing “four rows of three 2x4s” was an easier way to reach a count of twelve than tallying them one by one (true story). I remember how surprised and impressed his expression was. He confessed that he’d never understood what multiplication tables were for. He had never connected them to his world and so he never committed them to memory.

But memory isn’t just practically useful, it is also essential for living well in matters of life that are deeper than the surface.

Memory helps us to live where and when we are. As I mentioned previously, in our current age it is easy to view memory as optional. As Jeffrey Bilbro points out in his book, Virtues of Renewal, “[our culture] tends to understand memory by analogy to computer memory... This leaves us with a dramatically flattened kind of memory.”

We often confuse memory with the utility of a search bar. The data we need to live and make decisions is always at our fingertips, but we do not live by data alone. We live by stories, and places, and people, and the quiet rituals that shape us as whole persons. When we forget to remember, we tend to consume and handle life rather than contribute and enjoy it.

Memory helps us to truly inhabit time rather than simply moving through it.

To live well requires memory. It requires remembering what matters and why. It means remembering the name of the neighbor you met last week, the sound of your grandfather’s laugh, the pictures along the winding road that leads you home.

I can close my eyes and remember the way amber sap from the gum trees shimmered in the backyard sun of my childhood home. I remember the smell of my dad’s lunch box after a long shift at the factory. I remember the way my wife’s perfume smelled when we first started dating. I remember the first time I saw my son bleed and how it wrecked me inside. I can close my eyes and be in those moments. It all comes back when I remember.

These small acts of memory are what give continuity and meaning to our lives. They are how we stabilize ourselves in a world constantly pulling us forward. The person who has forgotten too much struggles to live well. This is why caring for loved ones with degenerative memory diseases and cognitive decline is so devastating. Yes, they may function, but not flourish. The joy of life seems to fade away with memory. What once held weight has become fleeting.

When we forget how to remember, we lose habits that once shaped our moral and intellectual lives. The roads we used to memorize are now dictated by GPS. Addresses, phone numbers, and anniversary dates we once carried by heart now live somewhere in the cloud. In outsourcing these small tasks, we have lost some of the meaning and quiet joy they once gave us.

This is why memory is not just an intellectual virtue. It is a spiritual one. Slowing down, paying attention, and storing things in the heart is an act of resistance in a distracted world. (Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 really convinced me of this recently.) Memory shapes our sense of self. It grounds us in place, time, and identity (Augustine’s Confessions helped me with this one).

Being present to the memories we cultivate is essential not only to living well but to loving well.

TRY IT: Practice Remembering Where and When You Are

• Take a walk without your phone. Try to memorize the route and notice the details along the way.

• Recall and write down three specific memories from childhood without photos or prompts.

• Commit to memory a recipe, a Psalm, or a poem. Make it something that connects you to your people or your place.

(3) Memory is Essential for Love

The creative faculty largely depends on the wisdom and controlled activity of the memory. - Sertillanges

If memory is the storehouse of thought and the anchor of presence, it is also the treasury of love.

Love deepens through remembrance. The friend who knows your stories. The spouse who remembers the little details. The grandparent who retells your childhood back to you when you’ve forgotten it yourself. Memory is what makes love personal. It is what gives it depth, history, and fidelity. Without memory, love becomes generic and unrooted.

This is why memory is also essential to the creative life. If you want to write poetry, make music, or make beautiful art, you must train your memory. You must learn to store up fragments of joy, echoes of pain, images of wonder. You must carry with you the scenes that struck you. What was the color of your childhood bedroom? What shape did your mothers mouth make when she smiled? What did the mornings of early parenthood feel like?

These things live in you, and love is what pulls them out.

The title of this essay is a borrowed phrase from my literary hero, Jesse Stuart. Memory is the currency of poetry. You cannot write what you have not felt. You cannot feel what you have not embraced and stored up in memory. If you want more creativity in your life, grow your memory. “Stabilize yourself,” Stuart would say. Let memory be the well from which your imagination draws water.

This is especially true in the intellectual life. The best thinkers are not the most original, but the most faithful. They return again and again to the great texts, the key insights, the rhythms and arguments and ideas that have shaped them. They exhaust their memory and find it to be an endless buffet of ideas. They remember, and in remembering, they love their subject more fully. Memory gives them the vocabulary to think clearly and the affections to care deeply.

The mind may be sharpened by logic and discipline, but it is warmed by memory. And a warm mind is well furnished and distinguished by love.

TRY IT: Practice Loving Through Remembering

• Write a short poem or reflection based entirely on a memory.

• Try remembering time not by dates but by seasons. Recall the smell of fall from your childhood. The feel of the air before a storm. The songs you hear each Advent. Memory is richer when rooted in rhythm.

• Memorize a passage of Scripture, a prayer, or a poem that you want to carry with you not just for knowledge, but for love.

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Interested in how memory shapes imagination, storytelling, and poetry?

I also write over at Prolific Dirt, a companion publication dedicated to creative writing from the ground up.

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Looking Forward

Memory is not an obstacle to thinking, it is a part of the foundation. It gives weight to our ideas, shape to our identity, and depth to our love. Within the Cognitive Skill Stack, memory is the layer that makes observation fruitful and wise judgment possible. Without it, we become trapped and unable to reason, create, or care with any lasting substance.

When we remember, we build, connect, and love.

What we remember becomes our possession. And, like any good currency, it only gains value when it is passed on.

Memory is not static. It is living.

It shapes our thoughts and stirs our affections.
Ideas are built on the currency of memory.

So, fill your storehouse.
Gather your treasures.
And give them away freely, again and again.

For in remembering, you become rich.